#224: Under The Weather ☀️
Happy New Year, loyal readers! I hope that 2020 brings you joy, peace, and reading. Before anything else, why not hit reply and wish me a happy 2020, too? I would like that.
Now that we’ve engaged in some mutual well-wishing, let’s get right to today’s issue. This week’s lead article, “Under the Weather,” explores the mental health issues emerging from climate change and the imminent destruction of the world. It’s outstanding. Then, if you’re emotionally spent, you might want to skip to the pet photo and the piece on Instagram face, to gather some energy, before doubling back to the articles focusing on how we don’t know how to raise boys properly or provide our Latinx students with teachers who look like them. I’m confident you’ll find this week’s pieces thought-provoking and sobering. Please enjoy!
+ Did you make a resolution to read more in the new year? If so, you’re in luck: Article Club begins this Sunday at 9:10 am. I can’t wait to reveal this month’s article. Sign up now!
Climate change is creating a mental health crisis. For some, that means denial; for others, it’s paralysis. For Ash Sanders, knowing that the world is doomed has led to anxiety, depression, and grief. She’s not alone: Many people suffer from climate-related psychosis, and doctors are prescribing therapy and drugs to combat these ailments.
But traditional medicine, with its focus on the individual, is failing to help people reconnect with the natural world. What’s needed, Ms. Sanders argues, is a greater understanding of ecopsychology and its efforts to build a lexicon that defines what’s happening to us. In this article, you’ll learn about solastagia, pre-traumatic stress disorder, and ennuipocalypse. Ms. Sanders writes, “All the advice I’d ever gotten had told me to lie and pretend. I wanted to be honest, because I wanted to believe that we might still be able to act meaningfully in the face of our own extinction.” (31 min)
“Today many parents are unsure of how to raise a boy, what sort of masculinity to encourage in their sons,” writes Peggy Orenstein, author of the forthcoming Boys & Sex. Meanwhile, boys are growing up largely on their own, learning to “man up,” rejecting their emotions, emasculating their friends, glorifying sexual violence, and finding misogyny “hilarious.” As 16-year-old Nate said, “If you hook up with a girl below your status, it’s an ‘L.’ ” And the point, of course, is to win. (34 min)
Latinx Students Rarely Are Taught By Teachers Who Look Like Them
We know that most public school teachers are white, most students are not, and students of all races prefer teachers of color. This article explains how the racial gap between teachers and students continues to widen. This is particularly true for Latinx students, especially in California, where many Latinx students never have a Latinx teacher. (15 min)
+ Also: Check out the interactive graphs to find out the teacher-student racial gaps in your district.
+ Also #2: Please avoid reading the comments.
If we keep loving Instagram as much as we currently do, beautiful women might all start looking the same, according to Jia Tolentino. That is to say: cyborgian, like a “sexy baby tiger,” with plump skin, high cheekbones, catlike eyes, lush lips, and a face that is “distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic.” If social media, in our neoliberal age, has taught us to build our personal brand to extract the greatest profit, why not do the same with our bodies? (6 min)
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